The disclosed embodiments relate to an improved print job scheduling approach for a print shop and, more particularly, to a system and method using “pull model” production principles to improve the print shop's ability to fulfill multiple print job orders for shipment to multiple physical destinations
Many printing systems in use today utilize printing plates or cylinders, which are engraved or photochemically processed to create an image thereon. In one example, ink, or comparable marking material, is then deposited on a plate or cylinder and the ink is thereafter transferred to a substrate, such as paper. In a conventional printing press, a number of pages are printed on a sheet of paper to form a signature, which is then folded and assembled with other signatures. The assembled signatures are then bound, trimmed and finished by finishing apparatus to produce finished books, such as magazines, catalogs or any other printed and bound matter.
Often, there is a need to produce different versions of books and/or customized books within a single press run. For example, it may be desirable to produce a number of standard books together with a number of books having additional and/or different signatures or pages therein. Also, it may be necessary or desirable to provide customized information in the form of an address label, personalized information or the like on the inside or outside of finished books. In either case, conventional printing systems are not easily adaptable to produce books of these types.
A printing system which has the ability to produce differing book versions and/or books with customized information is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,121,818 to Riley. The printing system includes a number of packer boxes disposed adjacent a binding chain wherein each packer box stores a plurality of signatures. A control is included for controlling the packer boxes to selectively feed signatures onto chain spaces of the binding chain so that books of varying content can be produced. Customized information can be printed on the signatures by means of an ink jet printer which is selectively operated by the control. Other types of customization can be effectuated, such as by inserting or onserting cards or the like.
Print fulfillment shops, such as book printers, increasingly print to fulfill orders, as opposed to printing to stock inventory. Typical orders may necessitate the production of many different documents that are then shipped in different quantities to multiple destinations. A publisher might order several book titles for distribution to its retail outlets, and have a quantity of each book type sent to a specific store—each quantity would depend on the number of copies remaining at a given one of the specific stores. Print production in this scenario can create problems in shipping and fulfillment departments if there are a large variety of books that need to be shipped as a unit to many different stores. If all required copies of a particular document (e.g., book) are produced in one print run and then distributed, at a shipping and fulfillment department, among multiple shipping containers, then the shipping and fulfillment department can quickly become cluttered with partially filled containers. This can be particularly problematic for a just-in-time fulfillment situation where the object is to ship a suite of documents with many different book titles but just a relatively few copies for each title. It would be desirable to provide an approach for improving document production management in the above-mentioned just-in-time fulfillment situation.